Though whether he is waiting or not seems no longer of any consequence. For the first time in my life, I feel larger than him, I have now grown to be part of this house, the place he forced me to leave. It has taken all this time for me to be grafted back into the family tree, to become one with the past, like the damp rising from the bottom of an ancient sea into the house, and with the woodworms crawling throughout its walls, slowly grinding the wood into grains and flakes and dust. I go up the cellar steps and shove the trapdoor open with my neck and shoulders. The handles hit the wall with a harsh, cold sound. No one can have been here for many hours. I hunker down for a while on the hall floor to catch my breath and then reach for a pair of dusty rubber boots that has been left under the stairs. The boots are a bit too tight but I manage to pull them on. The marble table top that fell over when Mr Carsten barged in is lying on the floor, but I shove it out of the way and go outside to stand on the long veranda. The dark is still solid around me and, within it, rain is drizzling down and dumbly soaking into soil and leaves and clay. The rain might well be the same as the rain of yesterday and of four weeks ago. Further away in the damp mist, the farm manager’s house, his car and parked trailer stand as they always have. Has Mr Carsten fled the field or has he just gone into hiding? Halfway across the yard in the dark, I stumble on something unexpected. I cup my hand around the beam of the torch to hide the light and carefully bend back the wet grass. In front of the toe of my boot, the blank white of an eye stares up at me. The dead dog lies flat on the ground with its tongue like a stiff piece of blanket between its teeth. It strikes me that I have forgotten my rifle in the cellar. The silence makes my eardrums bulge as if the procession was still under-way but makes its presence felt only as this unbearable internal pressure on the ears. Somewhere inside the thumping of the drums, inside the rustling of the rain, I hear Minna say what she said then, about Kaufmann: you must promise me to kill him, promise to kill him for my sake. In the pouring rain, she sounds feverish, and almost as if she is laughing. I walk to the manager’s house. The door is unlocked, the handle moist and sticky with rain as I pull the door towards me. I let the torch sweep over the flowery board on the lobby wall. The red ear protectors that hung there earlier are now gone. Oddly enough, I seem to know already where they are. I give the door to the room a hard shove with one shoulder and then stop and stand helplessly with my hands held out. Mr Carsten is seated on the bench at the kitchen table with the red ear muffs on his head and the gun he has shot himself with still jammed into the crook of his left arm. The upper part of his body is twisted back at a strange angle, as if he had been about to fall forward over the table but the force of the shot threw his body backwards again. Behind him, the kitchen wall is covered with a dark, reddish sludge, a partly set mix of blood and brain tissue that has run down to the floor in long congealing strings. His head, or what remains of it below the absurd ear muffs, is leaning over a little so that, from the doorway, the paralysed side is still directed towards me with its ghoulish half-smile and staring, lifeless eye. The air is thick with the cloying stench, a combination of blood, stale alcohol and vomit, and when the flies that have already been swarming around the corpse begin to buzz around my eyes and lips as well, I can no longer keep my retching down and run out of the house, squeeze myself in between the stack of logs and the rainwater butt and throw up. It has rained so much tonight and the previous nights that the butt is full to the brim. I fill my palms with water and press them against my face, then rinse out my mouth and splash water over the back of my neck. A breeze makes the water surface ripple a little; all that I can see of my reflected face is a shadow that fades and disappears when I straighten up. When I go out into the yard again, a few crows take off from the dog’s cadaver in the grass and fly cawing into the dark between the outbuildings. Other than that, the only sound is the monotonous rustle of the rain. Back in Mr Carsten’s place, I go through all the loose odds and ends on the kitchen table and then the bedside one. The receipts with Mr Carsten’s signature are not where I put them yesterday. He must have known that I had been here and wanted to see him, presumably also what I wanted to see him about. Perhaps it was the only reason why he broke into the house yesterday. All he needed to know was if I had sought refuge in the cellar, so that I would not hear the shots when he killed the dog and then himself. But others must have heard them quite clearly. During the long silence on the island between the landing of the last evening flight and the take-off of the first one in the morning, the sound of shots from a hunting rifle would carry everywhere, and should have woken all the neighbours, especially since the noise would have been followed by the barking of Brekke’s dog, which is always tethered outside at this time of the year. But there is not a soul in sight. I walk out into the yard, stand where Mr Carsten stood yesterday and train my binoculars at the Yellow Villa. Despite the dark, the letters of FUCKING NAZI on the garage wall are easy to make out against the coarse cement, as if the intention was for the words to be seen from the farm. Through the slowly falling rain, the indistinct sound of a car engine is growing stronger. At first so distant it is hard to pick up at all, the rasping noise of the gears is becoming audible. I hear the driver changing down and then, quickly, up again. It comes from down the hill. The Speedfreak, of course: Skakland’s son, who zooms from house to house, stuffing newspapers into people’s letterboxes. I cannot tell how many nights I have lain awake, waiting for Minna to come home and, towards the early hours of the morning, hearing the silence pierced by precisely these sounds, as usual feeling that, yet again, my long wait through the night has been in vain. But now the insistent throb of the engine noise reaches me from another direction; it is a kind of acoustic distortion, like the visual one of looking down at the Yellow Villa instead of, as in the past, looking up at the farm from down there. In the same way, the entire familiar landscape has changed into another that is itself and not itself at the same time. Now I can also see the beams of light from headlamps as the car comes along the road. They flicker nervously over the curtain of trees at the other side of the field, then sway and seem to retreat for a moment while the car, accelerating furiously, comes up the long slope from King’s Road. But Skakland takes the steep turn far too sharply. The headlamps shine into my eyes and, just before I get dazzled, I have a quick, strange glimpse of the car as it upends in slow motion, topples over and tumbles into the field. The engine is suddenly quiet but the headlamps are still on, their light seemingly stuck in the nearest tree tops. It is a while before I fully grasp what has happened. I turn quickly and run back. My first thought is to pull the gun from Mr Carsten’s hands (since he is likely to have fired only twice, there should be at least three cartridges left in the magazine), but it does not take me long to realise how silly that would be at this stage. Instead I go back down into the cellar and pick up Johannes’s old rifle from where I left it yesterday, leaning against the foot of the steps. Still not a sound from anywhere, as if the entire island has been lowered into a deep bowl of silence. I cross the slightly sloping and scoured grassland below the edge of the forest, the meadow where the white horse, mine and Minna’s horse, used to stand dreaming next to its white-enamelled tub, then into the field where Skakland’s car lies on its side, as if stopped while falling, its windscreen half ripped out of the chassis and so broken up by a fine network of cracks that it has become opaque. I walk around the car, shining my torch into it through the other windows, and then see the Speedfreak tipped forward with his chest pressed against the steering wheel. Scattered sheets of the daily papers lie draped all around him, over the passenger seat and the bonnet. I reach in through the gap in front, push the door handle down and manage to tug the door open. Skakland stays immobile, his body still squashed against the steering wheel. He must be conscious because his eyes follow me, as if closely observing my every move. Is there a spare petrol can in the car? I ask. He scrutinises me with the same seriousness as before but says nothing. I root around behind the front seats and get hold of
a plastic container that I had already caught a glimpse of among the bundles of newspapers in the rear, then reach into the car again and release the bonnet catch. Underneath, the engine is burning hot. I rip out the fuel feed, walk round the car, twist the lid off the tank, shove the hose inside and suck. The cavities of my mouth and nose fill with the nauseatingly greasy taste of petrol before I put the end of the hose into the container I have in readiness; once it is half full, I screw the top on and then try to get Skakland out. Somehow I haul his heavy body up on my back. Instinctively, Skakland clings to my shoulders and, sagging at the knees, I drag both of us along to the remains of my childhood home. Both the front and the back doors of the house have been left wide open. Broken furniture, shattered glass and bits of clothing are strewn everywhere in the grass and on the drive. I remember how Johannes always warned us when we were children against leaving toys outside overnight. You never know what kind of folk are out and up to no good, he used to say. Still, for all his years on the island, he was never subjected to anything like this. By now Skakland is definitely unconscious and doesn’t resist as I haul him upstairs. It takes a long time to strap him into the lifting gear that Johannes installed here. Just as I have him in place and ready to be winched up into the attic, he seems to come to. His glazed eyes are darting about inside the bloody mask of his face and he flaps about and strikes out with his arms so wildly I fear the whole block-and-tackle machinery will break free of its attachments. But when I have forced him into the Steib sidecar, he calms down for a bit, settles with the back of his neck resting on the top of the seat and sits gazing up into the ceiling. It apparently did not occur to the vandals to do anything about the books that Johannes stacked along the walls; they left the diaries as well. I quickly push as many as I can into the rucksack, where I already have the notebooks and photographs I brought down from the Kaufmann villa. The rest of the books I dump on the floor, as many as I can get at before the dust swirling up from the wooden floorboards of the attic becomes so thick I can no longer breathe. Then I walk backwards with petrol pouring from the open can but taking care not to spill too much at a time. Only when I have reached the steps do I let the petrol flow freely, some of it soaking into rags, and start fumbling in my jacket pocket for matches. The paper delivery man sits in the Steib sidecar, staring at me in amazement until what is about to happen suddenly hits him. But the flames are already forming a massive wall between us. On the other side of the billowing smoke, I see him make a forlorn attempt to get up. I throw the rucksack with the books through the attic hatch, jump down myself and then start running with the rucksack in my arms. I get out through the broken cellar door and onto the drive. Behind me, I hear the roar of the fire as it eats the dry timbers of the house. By the time I am in the garden, the flames have already ripped through the roof and are bursting through the upstairs windows.
Dawn. The sirens of fire engines have fallen silent and the red glow of the fire has died down. Only the rain remains, within the strangely bright space it seems to create. I take the rowing boat out on the lake, as Johannes and I did when we took Minna to her last resting place on a still day in November. The forest was soaked and as heavy as lead; all we could hear, apart from the rhythmic hammering of drops on bark and leaves, was the dull clatter of the oars as I put them in the boat, then the light splashing against the bow as I waded out in the water, pushing the boat while carrying the carefully wrapped brown cardboard box under my arm. I climbed in, hooked the oars into the rowlocks and began to row out to the middle of the lake with long, grinding strokes. Johannes is sitting aft, hunched under his yellow plastic raincoat, which is covered with white droplets like strings of pearls. He pretends to look out for birds. Oh, it’s still there! he calls out, it’s the bittern. In the thickening mist and rain it is practically impossible to make out anything among the reeds and, anyway, he is almost blind by now. I pull in the oars, take the urn from my lap. The ashes trickle between my fingers and transform into white butterflies like the swarm that fluttered around Minna when she was running along the water’s edge. Before dispersing, the flakes of ash gather into a fragile cloud over the grey, pitted surface of the lake. There is no name for it either. Johannes sits there, slumped under the raincoat with his face turned away. He, too, is no longer among the mortals, and the boat is drifting further and further out. I let my arms dangle over the gunwales and lightly touch the water, which is almost warm against my skin, despite the rain. Now the first plane of the morning is approaching, the usual faint whine growing first more solid, then into an ear-bulging roar. I hear rather than see the birds rising, their wings snapping against the water. The machine tears itself free from the tree tops and glides low above me until the steady beat of the blinking wing-tip lights slowly vanishes over the forest. The rain becomes heavier, the lake’s surface more deeply pitted. Beneath the surface, long, heaving swells lift the boat. The far shore disappears in the mist and I drift helplessly over the darkening water as if over an open sea.
About the Author
Steve Sem-Sandberg was born in 1958. He is the award-winning Swedish author of The Emperor of Lies, an international bestseller and winner of the August Prize. His most recent novel, The Chosen Ones, was awarded the Prix Médicis étranger in 2016. He divides his time between Vienna and Stockholm.
Dr Anna Paterson, an ex-neuroscientist, is a writer and award-winning translator from the Germanic languages into English.
Also by the Author
THE EMPEROR OF LIES
THE CHOSEN ONES
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2019
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
First published by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, in 2016
This ebook edition first published in 2019
All rights reserved
© Steve Sem-Sandberg, 2016
Translation © Anna Paterson, 2019
Cover design by Faber
The right of Steve Sem-Sandberg to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
pp. 74–5 Quotation from travelogue: Aspects of Nature in Different Lands and Different Climates (Ansichten der Natur) by Alexander von Humboldt, translated into English by Mrs Sabine, Lee & Blanchard, Philadelphia 1850, p. 27.
p. 76 Quotation from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, translated by Gregory Hays, The Modern Library, New York, 2002.
pp. 113–14 and 117 Quotations from Baedeker guides to Germany, translated by Anna Paterson from the Swedish versions of the texts by Barbara Knochenhauer.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–33453–7
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